the idea of an island
by dress without sleeves
Summary: An explanation for Brennan's irrational anger towards Booth in The Pain in the Heart. Cause she was mean to him, and it was pretty unfair. "There was no rational way to explain why a man like Seeley Booth would be ripped from this world."


**Author's Notes:** Title stolen shamelessly from geitizu's Supernatural Fanfiction page. Eventually, maybe, I will write a Bones fic where Bones and Booth are actually, you know, in the same room.

the idea of an island

She isn't thinking rationally and that's what scares her. Doctor temperance Brennan has always been rational, always been able to intellectualize the betrayals in her life and by so doing move on from them with minimal emotional damage. Her father left because he was a crook, and she was probably better off without him. Sully left her because she could not live a purposeless life. She does not sustain many emotional attachments because they are vapors of the human desire to feel connected. It's a statistical fact that most relationships are not long-term, and she's never been one to refute the math.

But Booth lied to her, and that makes her so _mad_, so absolutely _furious_, that her mind can't simply walk through its usual motions. She doesn't care that he was trapped in a safe house somewhere, probably with limited motion due to his extensive injuries, doesn't care that as far as he knew there _was_ no reason to contact her, since she was supposed to have known his death was a fake, doesn't even care that he looks at her now like she's gone insane because—

He didn't hurt her, he _scared_ her. She's never been scared like that before. Doctor Temperance Brennan prides herself on being level-headed, calm, collected, _rational._ She is able to process situations very quickly and then react accordingly and in a manner which is both even-keeled and straightforward.

She slips sometimes—when she thought Russ was dead, when she intentionally indicted herself in the murder of Kerby to keep her father from prison. But even then, even _then_ she wasn't afraid. The thought of Russ lying dead somewhere, another victim of her father's apparent disregard for his family, had made her sad—God, so sad and so damn _lonely_ that yes, in a moment of weakness she had leaned into Booth, let him comfort her in the way only he knew how.

That's a lot of heart, Bones, he'd said on the stand and she'd thought, yeah, I got it all from you.

But standing in the hospital. Hearing the words. Said with such cold _certainty_, he's dead, Special Agent Seeley Booth is dead, I'm sorry, is there anyone I should call—

She hadn't been sad, or calm, or brave, she had been _terrified._

Terrified of going through the rest of her life without her partner, without the only person in her whole world that somehow always knew what to say, that managed to make her feel more—_emotions_ than anyone else, even Angela. It was Booth that taught her to hug, to fist-bump, Booth that taught her how to chug a pint of beer without spilling any on her shirt, Booth that taught her how to cry in front of someone without feeling ashamed.

Booth that taught her how to forgive her father, how to let people back into her life, Booth that taught her everything she needed to know about being an actual _human being_, and she had so much left to learn, and he wasn't there to teach her anymore.

She was a scientist first, a woman second, and Booth had always known that, had never tried to change that, but now she was going to fall back into being a scientist _only_ again because it _hurt to damn much to do anything else._ And that was scary, terrifying, _paralyzing._ She could feel herself shutting down and didn't know where the _stop_ button was.

She'd had two best friends in the morning and just one by diner time, and she didn't know what to do with that information, how to process it, it was too much too soon and Booth would have known what to do and say to get her through the—the disbelief and the pain and the anger and the _oh my God this can_'_t be real_ but he wasn't there because he was _dead_.

And there was nothing rational about that, Doctor Temperance Brennan had realized, alone that night in her apartment. There was no rational way to explain why a man like Seeley Booth would be ripped from this world while others went free, while others were allowed to hurt and steal and murder. (Her own father.)

And seeing him, alive, fighting, blood _pumping_, his bones all covered up with skin—

That wasn't rational, either.

Booth would never hurt her intentionally, and so there was no way that he would put her through—through _that_, and so there was no way that he was alive, and if he was, the only conclusion she could draw—rationally—would be that he didn't care about her as much as he said he did, that being his partner didn't mean as much as she thought it had, and if that was true, then—then—

Then she didn't know what _was_ rational anymore, she had no _idea_ how to find her feet in this new world. It was a world made of impossibility and so there was no way she could intellectualize what had happened.

Sweets says _losing a loved one is hard_ and she thinks yeah, but shouldn't I be used to it by now?


End file.
